ABSTRACT
While the habit of decorating public and private libraries with statues, busts, mosaics, and painted portraits of famous philosophers, poets, and orators is well attested in the ancient Mediterranean world from the fourth century BCE onward, literary evidence for its continuation in the western provinces during the Late Empire is scant. As an instrument of literary canonization, the Epistula Rustici ad Eucherium participates in the new, or newly christianized, monumental discourse. Late antique pagan Latin literature contains nothing to set beside the Greek lives of philosophers and sophists. In the Epistula Rustici the secret memory-theatre of pagan literature entices and excludes the reading subject. It first implicates him as a curious child, then grows opaque to his adult counterparts. As master of his own text and of the brave new order of books it represents, he silently retreats from the paterfamilial library of imperial classics, drawing a veil between other readers, ourselves included, and the monuments it contained.
